> Interesting, your experience matches mine very closely! I once quit a doctoral program in disgust but once I had enough money to fund myself, I could go back

> Interesting, your experience matches mine very closely! I once quit a doctoral program in disgust but once I had enough money to fund myself, I could go back to become, perhaps similar to you, a "not regular PhD student" and create a more suitable situation for myself. Not only did I become free in my choice of research topic and collaborators/supervisors. More importantly, I was able to reject proposed, "faster" topics that would have led more immediately to bite-sized, publishable results. As a result, I was able to find and work on something I believe could be fundamental in my field. This is really the way to go. You have to love your field so much that you're willing to save up enough to support yourself to do independent research in your field. I've been thinking of doing that. Saving up enough to support myself to work on a research-esque project (i.e. not a startup with necessarily any revenue-generating potential). Your love for your field (in my case, computer science) has to be so great that you're willing to forego the currently ridiculously high developer salaries for a number of years to try to advance the field as a whole (which ideally benefits society on the whole, but doesn't benefit you in a financial sense anywhere as much).